Heavy metal’s early nurturer.

How Jim Simpson rocked Birmingham (and the world).

For some reason, songs about Birmingham, Alabama, resonate more than those from the original Birmingham, England’s second city. Brum UK has just one song I can think of: ‘Birmingham Blues’, a rocking track by the city’s Electric Light Orchestra (ELO).

Yet, Birmingham, England, has the richer musical pedigree, if you start in the Swinging 60s, the decade of the British Invasion (to America and the world). No one is more responsible for this than Jim ‘Mr Birmingham’ Simpson, recently honoured in the city with a Lifetime Achievement Award and recipient of a doctorate from the University of Birmingham.

Heavy metal nurturer, band manager, musician, author, photographer, music promoter, record company owner and music festival director, Jim Simpson has done the lot. And he’s still doing it at a remarkable 87, still working like a Trojan.

Jim Simpson put Black Sabbath on the musical map and is still going strong at 87. Courtesy: Birmingham Living.

Jim Simpson started off as a jazz musician and photographer in hometown Birmingham, after national service with the RAF in Gibraltar. “I photographed the likes of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mick Jagger, Nina Simone and bands who established Birmingham as the UK’s rock and roll capital,” Jim told Birmingham Living magazine this month.

Jim Simpson was 12 years ahead of Blondie

In 1968, Jim’s band The Locomotive were the first white group to cut a rocksteady song with Robert Thompson’s ‘A Message to You Rudy’. A top 40 hit, it was successfully covered as ska in 1978 by the influential Two-Tone band, the Specials, from nearby Coventry. To demonstrate how far ahead of the curve this was, Blondie’s 1980 cover of ‘The Tide is High’ is today considered one of the first white covers of a rocksteady song. Jim was 12 years earlier.

Jim Simpson’s Led Zeppelin connection

“John Bonham was in my band Locomotive. When he said that he was leaving to join Led Zeppelin, I responded, ‘Led Zeppelin. They’ll never get anywhere with a name like that. Stay with us.’ He didn’t, of course, but we remained pals.”

In 1968, Jim stopped playing to manage The Locomotive and a band called Earth. He also started his Big Bear record label and a nightclub he called Henry’s Blueshouse. (Henry was his neighbour’s dog.)

“I hated the name Earth and persuaded the band to change it to Black Sabbath.”

Henry’s Blueshouse is still running today, every Tuesday in Birmingham. “Back in the 1960s and 70s, I presented U.S. bluesmen like Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Curtis Jones, J.B. Hutto, Blind Gary Davis, Lightnin’ Slim and emerging UK blues-rock bands including Judas Priest, Status Quo, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Taste featuring Rory Gallagher and, of course, Black Sabbath.”

Visitors at Henry’s Blueshouse included Jim’s old bandmate, drummer John Bonham, and John’s mate Robert Plant.  “I’d known Robert and photographed him when he was with Way of Life and Band of Joy.” (Bonham also played in Band of Joy with Plant, as did Birmingham bassist Dave Pegg, later with Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull.) “Robert also came to our Henry’s Blueshouse, not to play, just to enjoy the music, so I got to know him. Planty would come down a lot and sit and drink with anyone decent.”

Much later, “when his (Robert Plant’s) son was playing football for (English soccer club) Lye Town, I got him a trial for Halesowen Town ( in the seventh tier of English league football), a team I was involved with for decades.”

Also regularly checking out the sounds at Henry’s Blueshouse was the Aston band who became Black Sabbath. Jim Simpson was delighted when they asked him to manage them.

Henry’s Blueshouse members Ozzy Osbourne (2^nd left) and Tony Iommi (2^nd right) approached Jim Simpson and asked if they could play a support spot at the club. Instead of payment, they wanted four Henry’s Blueshouse t-shirts.

 Managing Black Sabbath

“They were very civilised people,” Jim said in a radio interview. “We had a business meeting every single week.” 1968 was the end of the British blues boom, and the foursome had just changed from the Polka Tulk Blues Band to Earth, a moniker already taken by another band and which Jim hated. So, they needed a new name.

“At one of the business meetings, Geezer Butler, who was the bass player with the band, turned up very late, put his head round the door and said, ‘I’ve got it chaps. I’ve got the name … Black Sabbath”.

Terry ‘Geezer’ Butler – “I never went a day without reading” – was heavily influenced as a teenager by English occult novelist Dennis Wheatley, one of the world’s best-selling authors in the 1960s. Wheatley inspired Geezer’s lyric for the song ‘Black Sabbath’. Geezer’s choice as a band name, however, was inspired by the 1963 Italian horror film Black Sabbath, horror movies being a favourite of young British cinema audiences in the 1960s.

Jim Simpson remembers Ozzy Osbourne as, “One of nature’s good guys, a lovely kid: trusting, generous, always level but emotional. They weren’t outrageous in my time. They were serious musicians with one common goal: to be the heaviest band on the planet”.

Black Sabbath’s influences

Ozzy has often said he was inspired to take up singing by the Beatles. “I was walking round with a transistor radio … ‘She Loves You’ (by the Beatles) came on and it just went Bang. And that’s what I wanted to do.”

Geezer Butler, who lists Cream bassist Jack Bruce as his biggest influence, is regarded as one of heavy metal’s most influential bassists.

The late Jack Bruce, formerly of Cream. Geezer Butler’s biggest influence on the bass guitar.

Former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted rates Geezer Butler as his “number one influence … the best ever.”

Jim Simpson says Sabbath were also influenced by what they heard in Henry’s Blueshouse. “If you listen to that first album (Black Sabbath) you can hear Count Basie in there.” For the uninitiated, Bill ‘Count’ Basie led one of the world’s greatest jazz big bands for 50 years. ‘The King of Swing’, Basie won nine GRAMMY awards.

“With Bill (Ward) with his high-hat ride and Geezer’s full, square bass, you get the greatest riff band in rock (Sabbath) influenced by the greatest riff band in jazz (Count Basie’s) … Jimmy Rushing was one of Ozzy’s big influences in the early days when he was getting used to singing the blues stuff … he used to come round to my house and listen to these old blues singers like Rushing.”

Jimmy Rushing: early rock and roll pioneer

Jimmy Rushing singing with the Count Basie Orchestra.

Jimmy Rushing (1899 – 1972) started out as a blues shouter in those early days before microphones. Rhythm and blues (rock and roll’s forerunner) “has its roots in the blues shouting of Jimmy Rushing” wrote American music critic Nat Hentoff. So, for Jim Simpson and Ozzy Osbourne, here’s Jimmy Rushing’s 1962 track, ‘Rock and Roll’.

And for some background on Jimmy Rushing, here’s a short item I posted ten years ago.

https://www.paulmerryblues.com/meet-daddy-of-all-blues-singers-jimmy/

Not surprisingly Bill Ward picked Count Basie as his greatest childhood influence: Bill’s drumming influences also include John Bonham (“I’d known him since I was 16”), Ringo Starr and Traffic co-founder Jim Capaldi.

Tony Iommi’s five top guitar influences are Hank Marvin (Shadows), Buddy Holly, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen.

Sabbath: turned down by 14 record companies

To pay for that first self-titled album ‘Black Sabbath’, Jim Simpson gave away the publishing rights, after being turned down by 14 record companies. Finally, Vertigo took them on. But after ‘Black Sabbath’ reached number seven in the album charts with ‘Paranoid’ number one, the band split for London and new management. Jim is philosophical. “It was at a time when I couldn’t afford £200 for the band bus. How can you stay with the provincial manger who works out of his living room, when so much glitz and glam is being offered … but I still say Sabbath’s first two albums (the ones done with Jim) are the best they’ve ever done.” Backing that up is the fact it took until album number 13 until Black Sabbath had another number one.

Jim Simpson’s Henry’s Blueshouse. “Tuesdays is Bluesdays”

In 2019, after 49 years, Jim Simpson relaunched his famous Henry’s Blueshouse under the auspices of his Big Bear Music record label. It’s now running every Tuesday at 200 Broad Street, Birmingham. Jim also runs ‘Birmingham Rocks’ playing rock and roll, ska and everything in between at SNOBS from 6.30pm on Sundays, also at 200 Broad Street. And, remember, he’s 87.

Jim Simpson’s Big Bear Records

Jim Simpson’s Big Bear Records is Britain’s oldest independent record label, founded in Birmingham in 1968. Big Bear was the nickname given to Simpson by legendary English underground music radio icon, John Peel, after the way Jim walked: like a bear.

Specialising in promoting neglected U.S. bluesmen, Big Bear released over 30 American blues albums during the 1970s, by artists like Champion Jack Dupree, Eddie ‘Guitar’ Burns, Eddie ‘Playboy’ Taylor, Homesick James, Isaac ‘Doctor’ Ross, Snooky Pryor and Willie Mabon. Jim also organised extended tours of Britain and Europe for 35 U.S. bluesmen.

46 years ago, Jim (third from left, can’t you tell?) is pictured with artists recording his ‘American Blues Legends ’79’ album. Left to right: Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson, Jimmy Dawkins, Jim Simpson, Lester Davenport, Little Smokey Smothers, Eddie C. Campbell, Good Rockin’ Charles and Chico Chism. The shot was taken in 1979 outside the legendary Chess Records and Studio, 2120 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago. In 1993, Willie Dixon’s widow, Marie, bought the building, restored it into a museum, opening in 1997. It’s now home of Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation. The studio became an official Chicago Landmark on May 16, 1990.

In 1980, Big Bear also started putting out rock, jazz and swing and more after signing Birmingham new wave band, The Quads, whose single ‘There Must Be Thousands’ was John Peel’s single of the 1970s, even though hardly denting the charts.

Big Bear, Britain’s longest running independent record label.

Since then, Big Bear’s released everything from gospel and jazz to the rock of singer/guitarist Will Johns, son of Andy Johns, one-time sound engineer for the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Free and Van Halen. Legendary producer Glyn Johns is Will’s uncle, while former wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton, Patti Boyd (Will’s mum’s sister), is his aunt.

Jim still edits Henry’s Bluesletter and The Jazz Rag

Jim also edits his free weekly Henry’s Bluesletter, emailing it to 16,000 blues lovers worldwide, and his bi-monthly The Jazz Rag, winner of the Best Jazz Media prize at Britain’s 2023 Parliamentary Jazz Awards. The current issue has 35 jam-packed pages. If that’s not all, Jim also runs his artist management agency, Big Bear Music.

Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival

In 1985, Jim Simpson launched the Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival which celebrated 40 uninterrupted years in 2024. Last year saw 239 performances, from a host of countries, in 120 venues.

Jim the author

With his brother Ron, Jim Simpson has written three books: his biography, ‘Don’t Worry ‘Bout the Bear’; ‘Dirty Stop Outs Guide to 1970s Birmingham’ featuring local bands Duran Duran, UB40, Dexys Midnight Runners and more; and the just released “Dirty Stop Outs Guide To 1980s Birmingham”.

To get on Jim’s mailing list or buy his books, simply email admin@bigbearmusic.com